Kants Investigations into the Rationalists and the Empiricists Definitions - Case Study Example

Kant’s Philosophy: Setting the Limits of the Far-Reaching Mind Regardless of how critics and historians rank Immanuel Kant among the most notable philosophers who went before and after him, we cannot undervalue Kant’s contributions not just to the philosophical sciences but to all other departments of thought that in one way or another invoke the Kantian doctrines as their starting point or for its influence. In particular, Kant’s taking the epistemological debate to a new direction was considered his biggest contribution to philosophy as it was supposed to have ended the age-long debate between Rationalists and Empiricists. Kant’s investigations into the Rationalists’ and the Empiricists’ definitions of the origin of knowledge led to what Kant described as his “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy wherein he refuted the long-held belief that the mind is passive; Kant, instead, credit the rational, thinking mind for providing us with a systematic structuring of a representation of the world that makes our experience of it possible (McCormick). That is, how the world appears to us depends on how our mind perceives it based on our position and movement, thus the reference to Copernicus’ revolutionary theory. Based on this definition, Kant struggled to answer the question of what can we know and what can we not know. Kant argued that our knowledge is then constrained to the universal laws of mathematics and the empirical sciences and cannot extend to speculative metaphysics because our mind cannot fathom beyond what it holds within the spatiotemporal framework. A good starting point in any in-depth discussion of Kant’s philosophy and, especially, how he revolutionized the way the world, in general, and philosophers, in particular, think is to revisit the series of events that led him to his thesis and resulting treatises. Kant was indoctrinated in Wolff’s modified dogmatic rationalism, the thought prevalent in Germany during Kant’s academic years between 1747 and 1781; he taught about reason being the basis of knowledge (Turner). Towards the end of that period though, Kant started to question this belief. There were contradictions in the physical sciences he could not reconcile using the rationalists’ point of view and he began to reject the validity of metaphysical reasoning because of its shaky foundations (Turner). On top of it all, Kant revealed that it was his careful reading of David Hume’s analysis of the principle of causation that "interrupted my dogmatic slumbers and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction" (qtd. in Kemerling). Kant aimed to give the physical science a degree of certainty and to make metaphysical truths stand on more solid ground; these objectives led him to criticize the existing dogmas of Rationalism and Empiricism. The rational dogmatism had laid too strong an emphasis on a priori knowledge, knowledge based on reason alone, independent of all sensory experiences. To the Rationalist, as claimed by Liebniz, the world can be known through a careful analysis of ideas and derivations just by using logic. Underscoring the Rationalists faith is the belief in the mind possessing innate ideas and moral notions being grounded in an objective standard outside the “self”. Innate ideas are also the basis for Descartes famous “cogito ergo sum” statement which Rationalists believed to be a certain truth that even the most pernicious skeptics cannot touch (McCormick). Empirical philosophy on the other hand has reduced all truths to a posteriori judgments. Empiricists believed that our sensations provide us with the knowledge and reveal to us the properties empirical objects have in them. Locke, a noted Empiricist, put forth the idea that the mind is a blank slate, a tabula rasa, which fills up because of our experiences and interactions with the outside world. Experience teaches us everything. Moreover, Hume held that there is no immediate rational perception of “self” and morality originates from feelings. Kant doubted the Rationalists’ claims because of what he called Antinomies of Pure Reason, a pair of contradicting claims, or thesis and antithesis, which could both be possibly proven by use of reason. According to Kant, the validity of contradicting proofs stem from the erroneous assumption that knowledge of things as they are in themselves can be had, independent of our experience of them. Rationalists, then, are wrong to not trust the senses because in the world as we know it, or the empirical, apparent or phenomenal world, the senses are all we have. Kant also considered Rationalist to be right about “innate ideas” but only in the sense that our a priori analyses of ideas inform us of the content of those ideas. For Kant, the Empiricist may have been right about the senses being our primary source of knowledge but he expressed deep dissatisfaction with most of the empirical lines of inquiry particularly because these do not sufficiently explain the beliefs we have about objects. With the Empiricists’ grounding of knowledge on experience, we may be assured of the practical content of that particular knowledge but it is only true for the specific conditions of that experience and thus leaves us with little certainty for others. Therefore, Kant attempted to review all knowledge to determine how much of it may be designated as a priori and how much of it is a posteriori. He made two distinctions as to the varieties of judgments, namely: by reference to the source of our knowledge; and according to the conveyed information. The source, or origin, of our knowledge is either a priori or a posteriori. A priori judgments are purely based on reason while a posteriori judgments are those grounded on experience, limited in their application to specific cases. A priori and a posteriori judgments were the foundations of the dogmas of Rationalists and Empiricists, respectively. Kant revealed a lesser know distinction that refers to the content conveyed to us by information – that is, the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. Analytic judgments refer to judgments where predicates are contained in their subjects, self-explanatory and can be construed from the principle of non-contradiction (Kemerling). Synthetic judgments, on the other hand, are those whose predicates are distinct from their subjects, related only by reference to concepts external to them (Kemerling). Before Kant, philosophers did not differentiate between these distinctions. Kant started by considering all four logically possible combinations and came up with synthetic a priori judgments; synthetic because their content is a synthesis of facts, and a priori because the outside references needed to justify them are based on the strict universality of reason independent of experience. The possibility of such was not considered by both Rationalist and Empiricist thinkers but Kant believed synthetic a priori judgments to be the crucial case from which new information that are necessarily true can be learned (Kemerling). Kant supposed that synthetic a priori is the missing link that justifies obvious claims like "Every event must have a cause" that, according to Hume, is a belief for which we cannot claim epistemological justification with conventional a priori or a posteriori arguments (Turner). Geometry and arithmetic are also comprised of synthetic a priori judgments wherein the predicate is not given by the subject but the statements are true in reference to our conformity with the universal truths of mathematics. Natural science also needs to be grounded on the principles of synthetic a priori judgments for its power to elucidate, calculate, and predict events. Furthermore, unless they rely on synthetic a priori judgments, metaphysical truths are unjustifiable and uninformative (Kemerling). Thus, according to Kant, synthetic a priori judgments are not just a possibility but are the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. The validation of the possibilities of synthetic a priori judgments was what Kant sought to investigate in his infamous treatise, “Critique of Pure Reason”. To prove synthetic a priori claims, Kant employed what he called “transcendental argument”, a method of reasoning of his own innovation “from the fact that we have knowledge of a particular sort to the conclusion that all of the logical presuppositions of such knowledge must be satisfied” (Kemerling). Kant’s philosophy is a criticism of what in his day was the conventional belief regarding knowledge and his examination of knowledge was transcendental because the purpose was to inquire into the a priori forms of knowledge. In his “Critique of Pure Reason”, Kant started off with distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge: sensible, or knowledge based on sensations, which he discussed in the Transcendental Aesthetic section; and logical, or knowledge based on understanding and reason, which he took up in the Transcendental Logic section. In investigating the contribution of sensation to knowledge, Kant distinguished between materials and its form of appearance. The material is derived from our experience; the form, on the other hand, is imposed by the mind to give the material content and render it universal and necessary. The form is a priori, independent of experience; the most important of these forms, and in fact the conditions of all sensations, are space and time. Space and time are then derived from the mind from the data of experience and yet they are absolute and strictly subjective (Turner). Space and time, Kant argued, are the "pure forms of sensible intuition" under which we recognize what we do. This is where we encounter the limit of human knowledge. Our knowledge based on sensations cannot be extended beyond the restrictions imposed on the material of the senses. Moreover, the material represents the appearances of things and so our sensation confines us to the knowledge of appearances and does not allow us to penetrate the noumenon, or the reality of things. Kant divided the section on Transcendental Logic into Transcendental Analytic and Transcendental Dialectic. Transcendental Analytic delved into how understanding contributes to knowledge while Transcendental Dialectic was Kant’s take on the limits of understanding and pure reasoning. In his inquiry into the logical knowledge, or knowledge which we acquire by means of the understanding, Kant finds that thought begins with judgment and judgment both have content and form. The content of judgment, where understanding joins the act of judgment, is the sense-intuitions which in turn take place by the imposition of the forms of space and time on the data of sensation (Turner). The forms of judgment are imposed by the understanding which do not originate from experience but are a priori; these forms of judgment are what Kant called “categories”, the conditions of all possible experiences. The deduction of a schematized table of the categories is, in fact, the product of the first Critique’s Transcendental Logic, and they are as follows: Quantity (Unity, Plurality, Totality, Axioms of Intuition); Quality (Reality, Negation, Limitation, Anticipations of Perception); Relation (Substance, Cause, Community, Analogies of Experience); and Modality (Possibility, Existence, Necessity, Postulates of Empirical Thought). Kant held that these concepts are the crucial connectives in synthetic a priori judgments, bestowing upon them universality and necessity (Kemerling). Moreover, they bring diverse sensible intuitions to a common ground of experiences, the common ground being our self-consciousness. But they do not widen the circle of our knowledge; as with space and time, categories still hold us within the confines of what we can know based on our sense-experience (Turner). Thus, as with the knowledge gained through sensation, the understanding’s cognitive contribution is still within the bounds of the phenomenal (appearances of things) and do not transcend to the noumenal (reality of things). In his examination of reasoning in the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant finds that it has three distinct operations (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive reasoning) that corresponds to the three ideas, namely: psychological idea or the idea that the soul is a thinking subject; cosmological idea or that matter is the totality of phenomena; and theological idea or the idea that God is the supreme condition of all reality (Turner). Kant argues that rational psychology does not conclusively establish the immortality of the soul because of the erroneous supposition of having an intuitive knowledge. The cosmological idea, too, is a series of contradictory claims, or antimonies; that is, propositions regarding matter are no more true than their contradictions. Rational theology is also not conclusive and cannot support the theological idea; while the arguments can certainly put forth the claim that God is an intelligent architect, it doesn’t establish Him as a Supreme Being. This is not to say that Kant did not believe in the immortality of the soul, the ultimate reality of matter, or the existence of God because he never did deny these ideas; but the purpose of this part of the “Critique of Pure Reason” was to show that speculative reasoning do not add to our knowledge. These ideas though, serve to regulate our experiences. This is how Kant gave back in the “Critique of Practical Reason” what he took in the “Critique of Pure Reason”. The truths – the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God – are all laid on a solid moral basis that placed them above speculative contentions and metaphysical disputes (Turner). Kant rebuilt the temple of truth on “I ought” rather than the Cartesian dogma founded on “I think”. Grounded on moral law being the supreme law, “I ought” is more certain than “I am” and is superior to any other considerations because it is driven by the conscience. Moral law is universal and necessary, valid anywhere, everywhere and for all times. Moral law is, according to Kant, "the categorical imperative", an unconditional command and from it, all the important truths of philosophy are reasoned out. The freedom of the will follows from the principle of "I ought" which involves a choice of "I can" or “I will”. The immortality of the soul is similarly implied because moral law demands absolute human perfection but which we cannot attain in our corporeal existence, thus bringing the struggle to the afterlife. The existence of God can also be deduced from moral law. God is the embodiment of perfect holiness and supreme good implied by moral law, and He is, at the same time, the law-giver. In the second Critique, his followers saw how Kant built up on new foundations what he tore down in the first Critique when he put a limit to human knowledge (Turner). That the mind has limits was the fact Rationalism and Empiricism overlooked; that its constraints are both synthetic and a priori were not even considered. Kant’s putting forth the idea that our experience conforms to the synthetic a priori principles and everything we know within these confines are the phenomenal or apparent world rather than the noumenal or real world, taking epistemology in a new direction wherein we become aware of how the mind structures what we can know and also how limited we are in that regard. Admittedly, it is now rather difficult for us to see how pivotal Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy must have been to his contemporaries since Kantian doctrines are what we, in this age and time, have come to consider as the traditional or conventional way of thinking. That is, we who come after Kant believe – or we claim “to have always known” – that the mind is not passive, neither full of innate logic nor a tabula rasa that waits to be populated with ideas, but is rather active and is central to constructing reality and crucial to our quest for knowledge and yet limited by certain constraints. We do not have concepts of things which are beyond what we can place within a framework of space and time – that is the limit of human knowledge as Kant claimed and which we generally accept. Moreover, we now know that synthetic a priori judgments bound those limits; the new things that are informative to us are rooted in a synthesis of ideas which are justified and concluded by a priori, universal truths. And so we can formulate theses, postulate new theories, explain and predict events and structure reality in our minds. These ideas are so familiar that we can hardly imagine an argument to the contrary. As with his predecessors, the idea held by Kant that we cannot know the reality of things and only its appearance is something that layman of this day may find hard to reconcile with. After all the technological advances and the giant leaps humanity has taken to know, it is still quite difficult to grasp that what we know of things are how they are revealed to us, their appearances as opposed to their reality, within certain boundaries of time, space, categories. But we do not remain shackled to this empirical world for our minds to reason out the most important truths, because in the empirical realm those truths don’t exist. From Kant’s point of view, God, free will and the soul have been elevated to a higher intellectual truth that cannot be overthrown by metaphysical debate – moral law. Moral law is innate, it needs neither reason nor experience to make it universal because it is its own foundation; we cannot gainsay the voice of our conscience whether we choose to obey or not. Instead of silencing the arguments, Kant opened a floodgate for thoughts. What we can know may, for philosophers, be contained and restrained because of the confines as articulated by Kant (and which we accept as true). Yet, for all its limitations, the mind is still incapable of taking in everything; that is, there is still so much to learn and so much to know. Even as Kant put a limit to what supposedly we can know, his philosophy wasn’t about putting a lid on the search for knowledge; it was about asking the right questions. As we do ask those questions and find our answers, we unveil still more questions. We are on an endless journey of getting to know the world, which is not at all surprising considering that what we can know is not the reality of things but its appearance and there are concepts, ideas, truths beyond the limits of human knowledge which manifest in the empirical but which may be beyond our intellectual capacity. WORKS CITED Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason, Trans. Mary Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996. Kemerling, Garth. “Kant: Synthetic A Priori Judgments.” Philosophy Pages. 2001. 25 Nov. 2008 < http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/5f.htm#intro> McCormick, Matt. “Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Metaphysics.” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006. 25 Nov. 2008 < http://www.iep.utm.edu/k/kantmeta.htm> Turner, William. "Philosophy of Immanuel Kant." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. 25 Nov. 2008 Read More